Did The Calvinist Reformation in Geneva Pave The Way For More Militant Atheism?

                                                                             

                     Calvin- A "tyrant" to many but a "holy man" to his followers. 

                                        He aspired to make Geneva the "holy city"

Travel to Geneva, as we did in July, 1997, and you can't help but be thoroughly impressed by this cultural, world class cosmopolitan jewel in the southwest corner of Switzerland. Just sitting on the lake side and watching the Jet d' eau (color image lower right)and you had to marvel. 

                               Janice points to Jet d'eau in background

                                   Me at lake side enjoying the scenes on overcast day

                                   The Jet d'eau seen from our 4th floor hotel window.

Also, if you knew your Swiss history, how this location was a most uninviting place for freethinkers back in the 1530s, 1540s. After all, it was the zealous firebrand Johann Calvin (founder of Calvinism) who was called in 1536 to make Geneva the "Protestant Rome".

Did he succeed? Up to a point. But in his zealous program and reaction to it he may have unwittingly unleashed more militant, aggressive forms of atheism. Consider that even for lax Protestants - far less any Catholics - Geneva from 1541 to 1564 was not a very hospitable place. Committed to his program of rendering Geneva the "holy city" Calvin and his highly motivated minions went all out to do it. Their program included: routine and harsh censorship (i.e. no lewd, nude works of art), regular home visits by the clergy to ensure the faithful were toeing the line, and a network of informers who would have done the Nazis proud. 

The regulation included every aspect of life from the style of women's shoes to the names allowed for children as well as pets. Those who flouted the proscriptions or regulations, such as naming a dog after Calvin, faced more sever punishment including banishment and even execution. Yale prof Carlos Eire, author of the book 'Reformations: The Early Modern World 1450-1650', notes that over the time period indicated no less than 58 people were put to death and 76 were banished. This was out of a town with a (then) population of roughly 10,000.

Eire in his monograph is clear that the most potent force in the Reformation period is Calvin. Too many not au fait with the man (other than the American work ethic stereotype, i.e. forged by strict Calvinism) aren't aware that while Martin Luther spread his influence mainly through Germany, Calvin's spanned all of Europe. 

Interestingly, coincident with Calvin's reign, the Council of Trent (reactionary in itself) assembled over several periods from 1545 to 1563. It is not exaggeration to assert this Council set the program and course for Roman Catholicism for the next 400 years.  One of its offshoots, in fact, was the Society of Jesus - otherwise known as the Jesuits.  While the Jesuits have often been portrayed as the "shock troops" of Catholicism, it is truer to say that the Jesuits proudly reinforced the use of reason and pragmatism that - in Eire's words - "had always been an integral part of the Catholic tradition."

To substantiate this, attend theology (or philosophy)  classes at any Jesuit -run university - as I did from 1964-67 at Loyola University, New Orleans.  Discussions were wide ranging and critical thinking a required commodity.  These attributes served me well even after I'd transferred to the University of South Florida to pursue my degree in astronomy (which Loyola did not offer.)

In fact, as I observed in my June 29, 2010 post, Loyola's Jesuits were in many ways directly responsible for my atheist path.  As I noted:

"my questioning and suspicious mind and approach was only confirmed and augmented with each step I took, including a series of theology courses at Loyola. I'd also gone to hear one of the foremost Existentialist philosophers in the world, Jean-Paul Sartre, who came to the Loyola University Fieldhouse in 1964. And, of course, we learned at that lecture one of the cornerstone avoidances of the Existentialist, is "bad faith".

This was the cardinal sin, if you will. The most serious transgression an authentic being or person can make. By "bad faith", Sartre meant going against your own interior barometer, to "go along to get along". It made life relatively easy (few conflicts) but ultimately led to despair since an artificial life was substituted for an authentic one."

Given this, it doesn't appear to be a stretch that Calvinism's excesses spawned a vigorous reaction of questioning and criticism from the Jesuits, also the products of the Reformation. And just as my continued critical thinking led me to atheism, that Reformationist reaction might have led to a more ambitious, aggressive form of atheism - as later vindicated by the onslaught of modern science. Who needs popes, Canon law or '95 Theses' when  Darwinian evolution and the Big Bang disclose supernatural agents as redundant?

Eire himself doesn't shy from the negative side of the Council of Trent including the Inquisition, the suppression of deviance, and the supremacy of value attached to celibacy and virginity. But looking at these in retrospect, they would have only incited an even more critical, hostile and militant atheism- of the form that ultimately took hold in the early 20th century, i.e. with philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and others.

Ultimately, I have to agree with Eire  that the Calvinist legacy of the Reformation period incepted Christianity's fragmentation.  With it, the epistemological space thereby created paved the way for secularism, skepticism ....and a hardy, no fools tolerated....atheism.  It is hardly astonishing that since the Enlightenment one finds most physical scientists are atheists. This is not merely a reflection of their ideological choices but also of the recognition that there is no place for supernaturalism in modern physics, chemistry or biology.

Xtianoid Twitterati Strike Back at 'COSMOS'

I must admit to being wrong, in my post about the new 'COSMOS' series when I wrote:

My take is there won’t be any such ‘pushback’ because these close-minded dolts won’t bother to watch it in the first place!  They are too sure of their blind faith based on nothing but superstition and old wives tales elaborated by primitive, semi-literate nomads in an ancient book.

This was in response to Denver Post reviewer Joanne Ostrow's take that 'pushback' would come from "conservative religious quarters" who didn't like the graphic animation of how the Roman Catholic Inquisition put Giordano Bruno to death for his conception of an infinite universe. The segment was very well done, especially the scene where Bruno is dragged in front of his accusers - all Bishops - who also had the appearance of psycho perverts with their dark-rimmed beady eyes and reptilian pupils and the exaggerated five o'clock shadow with some drool coming down over the lips. It was well done but I didn't think any of these idiots would respond because well, they wouldn't watch it!

But I was wrong! According to a salon.com report, these Neanderthals came out guns blazing. According to the report:

"Some of the poor souls oppressed by Neil deGrasse Tyson’s return to the promised land first pioneered by Carl Sagan took to Twitter with their predictable grumblings. My favorite: “Dear #cosmos, the origin of the universe actually is not mysterious. God had Moses write about it in the #Bible. You should read it sometime.”


Well uh, okay, if you're going by the old wives' tales of Genesis, it's not mysterious. But, to those of us who've studied physics, we'd still like to know the Earth can exist BEFORE the Sun, when the Sun's origination is essential to spin off the Earth and other planets.  We know from modern astrophysics that the solar proto-nebula had to collapse first to yield the SUN. (No planets, since they had yet to spin off the collapsing nebular cloud – it hadn’t cooled enough to allow it). As the proto-solar nebula collapsed it also began spinning and gained angular momentum. This angular momentum was then transferred to regions of the nebula that cooled and separated from the whole, and these regions became separate clouds of dust and gas that aggregated into the planets. Under a combination of electrostatic attraction (between larger charged particles) and gravity (attracting the whole mass from the center of the cloud) each planet was formed as what we call a “planetesimal”.

As more angular momentum was transferred – the planetesimals (each one) acquired their own spin (in a period of revolution) and specific shapes. The giant planets (e.g. Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus) garnered more spin momentum than the more dense, terrestrial planets. Thus Jupiter’s planetesimal ended up as an oblate spheroid with diameter of about 88,000 mile and rotating rapidly with a day of ~ 10 hours. Earth meanwhile ended up as a relatively spherical orb with diameter of ~ 8,000 miles and day approaching approach 24 hrs. Mars ended up in a similar shape to that of Earth and a diameter of 4200 miles and day ~ 24 hours.

Thus, the Earth spun off about 1.1 billion years after the solar nebula fully collapsed, and it could not have come BEFORE the Sun.

Yet Genesis (1:1-5)proclaims :

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light and there was light....

which is nonsense. . It is clear from this that Gen.1:1-5 has stated a patent impossibility which violates all known laws of physics and dynamics and is therefore WRONG! It is clear from this that the Bible must be in error, certainly in this one passage – and if here then likely in many other places too. If this is so then it must have been written by flawed humans using limited conceptions of space, time and astrophysics which accounts are not even correct in their most general form.

The actual origin of the cosmos is indeed a deep mystery because it entails the fact that we may inhabit a multiverse, not just a universe.  Thus, the mystery enters by way of the inherent complexity of the theories, including for M-branes, e.g.
http://brane-space.blogspot.com/2010/09/how-could-universe-originate-from.html

Another howler in the salon.com report is the Evolution News and Views take,  published by The Discovery Institute - backward bunch of Seattle-based goobers who are all for "intelligent design" but refuse to explain who or what this 'designer' is. Anyway, their take on COSMOS is that  Giordano Bruno "wasn’t even really a scientist, and he was burned to death because of his theological heresies and not his belief in Copernican theory," (SO HE DESERVED IT!)

Also,  "the main reason he showed up on “Cosmos” at all was because he was the only one with even a passing association with a scientific controversy to be burned at the stake during this period of history.”

Of course, this is nonsense. According to Henry Lea, the author of 'The Inquisition of the Middle Ages' we don't really know how many of those expressing scientific theories (say based on Copernicus' heliocentric theories) might have been burned at the stake. It could run into the thousands, as records weren't always kept. Also, their property was also confiscated first, and there was little to go by in ascertaining their identities.  Bruno then is likely the most major and significant example, representing all  those of scientific temperament burned at the time.

The argument that he "wasn't really a scientist" also rings hollow and uninformed. What is science, after all? It is based on open inquiry, asking questions and finding out ways to pursue the answers. Giordano Bruno may not have had the empirical tests available to test his concept of an infinite universe, but he did extrapolate to his concept from Copernicus' results. Yes, his idea of untold numbers of populated worlds was speculation, but it was scientific speculation little different from Carl Sagan's own speculations, written about in his assorted books.

The dumbest aspect of the knuckle dragging religious Twitterati is that Cosmos is labeled “a glossy multi-million-dollar piece of agitprop for scientific materialism” as if that’s a bad thing.   In fact, scientific materialism is the ONLY philosophy that puts us in touch with reality, all else is superstition and tomfoolery.

It is precisely scientific materialism that provides and energizes the drive to make measurements to confirm that what we think we observe, is actually there- and then accounting for it in a physical setting.  For example, it enables us to grasp that the "Miracle at Fatima" was no miracle at all.

In his essay collection Unweaving the Rainbow biologist Richard Dawkins, Britain's most prominent atheist, chose to examine the Fatima miracle of 1917, where 70,000 people "reportedly saw the sun move", to apply Hume's principle: As Dawkins observed:

"On the one hand, we are asked to believe in a mass hallucination, a trick of the light, or mass lie involving 70,000 people," Dawkins writes. "This is admittedly improbable. But it is LESS improbable than the alternative: that the sun really did move...If the sun had moved in truth, but the event was seen only by the people of Fatima, an even greater miracle would have been perpetrated: an illusion of NON-movement had to be staged for all the millions of witnesses not in Fatima."

The dual –tandem improbability associated with the Sun actually moving is less than getting a royal flush in poker 6.5 million times in succession. It is actually less than the proverbial monkey on a typewriter re-typing Hamlet in its entirety, and with no errors. It is indeed, beyond the realm of physical possibility especially as NO solar observatories around at the time - detected ANY motion! Hence, it had to be all in the believers' heads.

This comports with David Hume's principle of what it would take to accept any "miracle":

"No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish."


In other words, given a mass hallucination by those at Fatima that day is LESS miraculous than that the Sun actually moved even a centimeter -- then clearly THAT is the only explanation the rationalist can accept!

Hence, we see here the sheer power of scientific Materialism at work. Observations, REASON and formulating a consistent conclusion based on them!  Contrary to most fundies' misperceptions, scientists do not willy-nilly accept violations of physical laws without demanding empirical support for the claim. If you insist that water can be changed into wine, a scientist (or scientific Materialist)  will demand to see your evidence for such a feat. The same applies to the claim of a man "walking on water", or "brought back to life". In each case, the evidence by which a natural law is violated must be thoroughly scrutinized.

In this process, all alternative natural explanations must be considered-- including outright trickery or fraud, before the actual violation of a physical law is conceded. If you instead simply quote an ancient text, you will be summarily dismissed as a babbling idiot.

The 'Cosmos' complainers, if they have any sense, will go back to their enclaves and rethink their nonsense, and also realize this is one contest they can't win.   As the author of the salon.com piece put it:

"All we need to do to see our world descend into a real pit of hellfire is to continue to let the nonsense propagated by The Discovery Institute stand uncontested, while we greenhouse gas ourselves to the boiling point. Kudos to “Cosmos” for calling bullshit."